Interior 1972

Richard Artschwager made this oddly doubled-up ‘Interior’ sometime during his career. It looks like it was made using some kind of printing process, or maybe a really dry brush. What grabs me here is the way the texture and the muted colors create a ghostly effect, like a faded memory or a dream. It makes the familiar setting of an interior space feel distant and unreal. Check out the way the details sort of dissolve into the overall pattern. The whole piece is built up from tiny dots, like some kind of weird, haunted Ben-Day dots. The chair in the foreground, for example, is almost completely black, but it’s made up of all these tiny marks. The paint handling is so dry, it almost looks like it’s been rubbed onto the surface. It's kind of cool how Artschwager takes this very traditional subject – an interior – and makes it feel so strange and contemporary. It reminds me a bit of Vija Celmins, someone else who found a way to make work that investigates the nature of seeing itself.